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Okay, so then you're saying it's okay to kill the kids, right? After all, Israel didn't put them there.

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You do realize you're making Sidd's genocide argument for him, don't you?

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when we killed Zarquawi we killed a kid that was in the house. that sucks. i glad someone else had to give the order, but glad they did.

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Genocide is hard.

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remember my dog Peanut? he had that tumor taken out- well they also took some healthy tissue from around it. The vet didn't do it to kill him. in fact Peanut seems overall healthier now, with it gone.

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That's wonderful. Tell me, was the Vet able to identify the location of the tumor with some specificity, or did he just sort of hack around at anything that didn't look quite right to him?

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once he decided to cut, he cut several other tumors that seemed suspious, yeah, I forgot that part. the cutting is traumatic to Peanut. so once we knew we had to do it, we wanted to do all the cutting that seemed likely necessary, or possibly necessary.

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If those tumors had been hiding behind Peanut's heart, brain, or lungs, would you have asked the vet to cut out the organs to make it easier to get to the tumors at a lower cost?

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good point. if that had happened I'd have asked the vet to erradiate the whole area and hope what's left would grow back heathly, but still making sure the tumors go.

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That's fantastic, Adder. Irrelevant to the point I was making (that Hezbollah is not inclined to pursue any Sinn Fein-style solutions), but still, I applaud your ability to distinguish.

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Yes, please do. Please continue to treat a terrorist group like Hezbollah as if it is an ethnic group. As if Hezbollah guerillas and suicide bombers are comparable to Hmong farmers.

Wonk, this is a deeply fucked up sentiment.

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Indeed. It is defined in the relevant Convention as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.




Killing an innocent in the course of killing a terrorist, while tragic, is not remotely akin to genocide.

Nor is attempting to wipe out an enemy military, such as Hezbollah.

The Apache, the Huks, the Hmong, and a very very lengthy list of others were victims of genocide. Hamas and Hezbollah cannot be, by definition.



eta: One could, however, make the argument that Hezbollah and Hamas are perpetrators of genocide. Are not their indiscriminate rocket attacks designed to destroy an ethnic or religious group in whole or in part?

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At the risk of repearing myself, there was a 25 year period where the same could have been said of Sinn Fein and the IRA.

Do I have to go through the whole circle for you again?

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No. You really don't.

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Not that I believe that Israel is engaged in genocide ('cause they are not), but this does not help you. Is there not close question as to whether Hamas and Hezbollah are either a national or a religious group? They certainly have national aspirations. And, in theory at least, they share a set of religious convictions.

And I note that there is nothing in there that says the victims of genocide must all be innocents. Certainly there were enemy combatants among the victims of genocide in Rwanda and Balkans.

I'm just saying this may not be your strongest line of argument.

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Your Nazi analogy was better. Happily, the Nazis decided to stop fighting when their country was invaded and their cities flattened.